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>Instead of covering the [tech] industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly op

by _zgx0 4y ago

>Instead of covering the [tech] industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair. ... >Tech executives and investors mostly did not like this change, for understandable reasons. And I mostly agree with them on the merits. The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage? That's nonsense. Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US. Large tech companies have huge impacts on politics and news. Suggesting that tech should not be subject to investigative coverage is hard to understand. It seems like one of the most important subjects of that coverage today. You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US. Nowhere near as powerful as media. Wealthy sure.
- froh 4y ago
  media == tech these days. twitter, Instagram, TikTok, FB, they are media, YouTube is media.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    When it comes to the business of telling you what the nature of the world is and how to think, it's really impossible for me to conjure up something more authoritative than the New York times. Sure there's people on social media saying things, but the stuff that's an echo of the NYT sounds right and true, the stuff that's against it sounds low-brow and coarse.
    - mindslight 4y ago
      The New York Times (et al) set the official narratives. Faceboot and its ilk shape the many counter reactions to it. Despite being comprised of multiple journalists, everyone basically thinks of NYT as a singular entity with its own reputation. On Faceboot, memes carry the social proof of your own personal relationships. And the most worrisome is that people know NYT's narratives are not their own thoughts, whereas people think the narratives they got from Faceboot are.
    - anticrisis 4y ago
      That is your educated perspective. A larger share of Americans place greater trust in what they hear about public issues on social media from interesting personalities than in the NYT, sadly.
      - froh 4y ago
        the NYTimes at this time has 4.sth Mio subscribers and 10k videos, indeed: https://youtube.com/c/nytimes https://youtube.com/c/nytimes
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    Google is media. The largest US companies by market cap considered “Information Technology” nowadays are Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Visa and Mastercard.
torstenvl 4y ago
As noted in the quotes you yourself pulled, what OP "agree[s] with" "[t]ech executives and investors" about is tech coverage that is "highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair." Nobody is "suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens."
WillPostForFood 4y ago
You said that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?! Yglesias actually said: And the press should try to normalize coverage of the tech industry as just another business sector. Which would include investigative coverage when appropriate.
- smeagull 4y ago
  Fawning is typical of media coverage of most business sectors.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Don't think mining and oil and gas really get fawning reviews, or the local pizza place. Or the most expensive restaurant in NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/dining/pete-wells-per-se-review.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/dining/pete-wells-per-se-...
couchand 4y ago
Dude's been going on a downward spiral for years. Nothing he says these days follows any kind of coherent framework, it's just something thrown on the wall to see what sticks. He's really honestly describing himself with this take.
- astrange 4y ago
  MattY is extremely consistent, but also can't help himself and constantly tweets in a layer of irony or two. This causes some people to get extraordinarily mad at him in the replies, at which point I like to play a game of figuring out how they misread the tweet, which they always seem to have done. His actual articles are perfectly straightforward, sincere, and usually on some topic like "Boston subway stations should cost less to build".
  - couchand 4y ago
    He certainly USED to write articles like that!
ForrestN 4y ago
He's not saying that they shouldn't be subject to coverage "with an investigative lens." He's talking about the adversarial, negative tone of the coverage, relating to the tech industry primarily as full of bad actors rather than a power center worthy of investigation that also does some good things, say. I don't think Yglesias would say we shouldn't investigate these companies, but rather that we should paint a more wholistic picture about both the good and bad contributions of these companies that better matches reality.
- watwut 4y ago
  It is OK to use adversarial tone. Journalists do not have to limit themselves to fawning admiration. And before there was criticism, there was surplus of fawning admiration. Cool companies were praised to heaven and admired, Thermos, Tesla, Uber, Google, Facebook you name it. Correction was necessary.
- _zgx0 4y ago
  He correctly identifies a fundamental difference between business/consumer reporting, which is often fawning regurgitations of PR materials made with limited due diligence and investigative reporting. I stand by my comment, it seems to me that he is saying the change from business/consumer to investigative was unwelcome and he agrees with that reaction. I think investigative journalism should be fair, but I don't think someone investigating Alphabet has to present the good that the company does - that's the job of Alphabet's PR department. Fair journalism does not leave out relevant context but doesn't speak to unrelated "good" contributions. Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    Personally when I look at the tech section I want to hear what's new in technology (I guess you'd call this marketing), not politics and gossip about what some rich meathead said. Put politics in the politics section, and the gossip in the tabloids.
AlexandrB 4y ago
The tech industry needs more investigative coverage, not less. The reason disasters like Theranos or Nikola were able to waste as much time and money as they did is because most of the tech press is focused on regurgitating press releases and hyping up the next big thing.
- Aerroon 4y ago
  I don't see how investigative journalism would fix the situation though. Theranos scammed wealthy investors. Wealthy investors should be able to do at least a little bit of due diligence. If they had done that then they would've known their idea was not feasible. It's the investors themselves that added to the hype regardless of the press releases.
  - paulgb 4y ago
    Theranos scammed wealthy investors but also hurt a lot of other people in the process, namely patients who received bad tests and employees who have a black mark on their resume. In an ideal world maybe investors would have done more DD, but there is a lot of money out there. Many investors likely did turn them down, since their funders didn’t include many traditional SV VCs, despite being next door to Sand Hill Road. It was ultimately the WSJ that broke the story. Even if investors find something during DD, they have strong incentives (libel law) not to share it.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Remember Theranos wasn't even big tech, and only had one major Silicon Valley investor in it; they were a fake big tech company attracting people who wanted to be SV but weren't. The usual VCs didn't even trust them!
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    Add NRGV ("Energy Vault", once well over $2B, now $0.4B and still badly overvalued) to the Theranos pile. And all but one of the fusion startups. (Maybe them too.) Kyoto Fusioneering has realized that there is lots of money to be made selling parts for phony demos to fusion startups. BTW there will not be any Mars colony in this century. Or Tesla office-robot.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
A major problem with the technology media is that they don’t investigate the companies, because they have to stay on their good side in order to be invited to the events, and to get the information. When they criticize the company the company freezes them out; i.e. Apple.
klooney 4y ago
Yglesias doesn't think that no investigation should be done or that tech is all good- he has a riff that "Facebook is bad, Facebook employees should feel bad about working there, and they should feel shame admitting where they work" that he goes on occasionally.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
> You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue. That's because he's being very charitable to what is happening. In fact, under the guise of aggressively investigative coverage, the media is constantly propagating false memes about the industry. Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants.
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  Too on the nose. When I worked at faang almost my entire org was Indians.
  - PradeetPatel 4y ago
    The generalisation of "Indians" in the tech sector is doing a lot more harm than one may think. India is a massive country, with some of the most diverse range of cultures and people. The fact that most FAANG CEOs are Indians should speak volumes. Negative stereotyping hurts everyone, only by acceptance and embrace our differences can we move forward.
    - bagels 4y ago
      Do you consider "Indians" to be pejorative?
      - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        He probably considers being lumped in with certain other Indians pejorative. It's funny, on producing that interpretation my first thought was 'He must be high caste'. Now that's a negative stereotype!
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - xwolfi 4y ago
DeathArrow 4y ago
>Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US. I thought weapon and pharmaceutical industries beat the tech.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  On power, probably (at least lobbying power - direct influence on us is the opposite); but on wealth, Apple + Microsoft is enough to make the tech sector the wealthiest.
rrwo 4y ago
I was going to post the same thing.
BurningFrog 4y ago
> The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage? That this very basic failure of reading comprehension has been voted to the top is both sad and surprising.
- scrozier 4y ago
  That this very basic lack of clarity in writing was misunderstood is unsurprising.
majjgepolja 4y ago
Not so sure about that, with a certain clickbait coverage of solarwinds story creating bad PR for Jetbrains, (perhaps among the least controversial tech companies). That's what happens when liberal arts people think they're too delicate to understand anything more nuanced than US political thing of the day.
colinmhayes 4y ago
>> highly oppositional at all times > tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage? I don't see how you can read his quote and come up with yours. Absolute strawman
mensetmanusman 4y ago
“Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US.” Industries more powerful: -Finance -Banking -Defense -Oil&Gas

by _zgx0 4y ago

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US. Nowhere near as powerful as media. Wealthy sure.

froh 4y ago
media == tech these days. twitter, Instagram, TikTok, FB, they are media, YouTube is media.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  When it comes to the business of telling you what the nature of the world is and how to think, it's really impossible for me to conjure up something more authoritative than the New York times. Sure there's people on social media saying things, but the stuff that's an echo of the NYT sounds right and true, the stuff that's against it sounds low-brow and coarse.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    The New York Times (et al) set the official narratives. Faceboot and its ilk shape the many counter reactions to it. Despite being comprised of multiple journalists, everyone basically thinks of NYT as a singular entity with its own reputation. On Faceboot, memes carry the social proof of your own personal relationships. And the most worrisome is that people know NYT's narratives are not their own thoughts, whereas people think the narratives they got from Faceboot are.
  - anticrisis 4y ago
    That is your educated perspective. A larger share of Americans place greater trust in what they hear about public issues on social media from interesting personalities than in the NYT, sadly.
    - froh 4y ago
      the NYTimes at this time has 4.sth Mio subscribers and 10k videos, indeed: https://youtube.com/c/nytimes https://youtube.com/c/nytimes
- kgwgk 4y ago
  Google is media. The largest US companies by market cap considered “Information Technology” nowadays are Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Visa and Mastercard.

torstenvl 4y ago

As noted in the quotes you yourself pulled, what OP "agree[s] with" "[t]ech executives and investors" about is tech coverage that is "highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair." Nobody is "suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens."

WillPostForFood 4y ago

You said that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?! Yglesias actually said: And the press should try to normalize coverage of the tech industry as just another business sector. Which would include investigative coverage when appropriate.

smeagull 4y ago
Fawning is typical of media coverage of most business sectors.
- astrange 4y ago
  Don't think mining and oil and gas really get fawning reviews, or the local pizza place. Or the most expensive restaurant in NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/dining/pete-wells-per-se-review.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/dining/pete-wells-per-se-...

couchand 4y ago

Dude's been going on a downward spiral for years. Nothing he says these days follows any kind of coherent framework, it's just something thrown on the wall to see what sticks. He's really honestly describing himself with this take.

astrange 4y ago
MattY is extremely consistent, but also can't help himself and constantly tweets in a layer of irony or two. This causes some people to get extraordinarily mad at him in the replies, at which point I like to play a game of figuring out how they misread the tweet, which they always seem to have done. His actual articles are perfectly straightforward, sincere, and usually on some topic like "Boston subway stations should cost less to build".
- couchand 4y ago
  He certainly USED to write articles like that!

ForrestN 4y ago

He's not saying that they shouldn't be subject to coverage "with an investigative lens." He's talking about the adversarial, negative tone of the coverage, relating to the tech industry primarily as full of bad actors rather than a power center worthy of investigation that also does some good things, say. I don't think Yglesias would say we shouldn't investigate these companies, but rather that we should paint a more wholistic picture about both the good and bad contributions of these companies that better matches reality.

watwut 4y ago
It is OK to use adversarial tone. Journalists do not have to limit themselves to fawning admiration. And before there was criticism, there was surplus of fawning admiration. Cool companies were praised to heaven and admired, Thermos, Tesla, Uber, Google, Facebook you name it. Correction was necessary.
_zgx0 4y ago
He correctly identifies a fundamental difference between business/consumer reporting, which is often fawning regurgitations of PR materials made with limited due diligence and investigative reporting. I stand by my comment, it seems to me that he is saying the change from business/consumer to investigative was unwelcome and he agrees with that reaction. I think investigative journalism should be fair, but I don't think someone investigating Alphabet has to present the good that the company does - that's the job of Alphabet's PR department. Fair journalism does not leave out relevant context but doesn't speak to unrelated "good" contributions. Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.
- JamesianP 4y ago
  Personally when I look at the tech section I want to hear what's new in technology (I guess you'd call this marketing), not politics and gossip about what some rich meathead said. Put politics in the politics section, and the gossip in the tabloids.

AlexandrB 4y ago

The tech industry needs more investigative coverage, not less. The reason disasters like Theranos or Nikola were able to waste as much time and money as they did is because most of the tech press is focused on regurgitating press releases and hyping up the next big thing.

Aerroon 4y ago
I don't see how investigative journalism would fix the situation though. Theranos scammed wealthy investors. Wealthy investors should be able to do at least a little bit of due diligence. If they had done that then they would've known their idea was not feasible. It's the investors themselves that added to the hype regardless of the press releases.
- paulgb 4y ago
  Theranos scammed wealthy investors but also hurt a lot of other people in the process, namely patients who received bad tests and employees who have a black mark on their resume. In an ideal world maybe investors would have done more DD, but there is a lot of money out there. Many investors likely did turn them down, since their funders didn’t include many traditional SV VCs, despite being next door to Sand Hill Road. It was ultimately the WSJ that broke the story. Even if investors find something during DD, they have strong incentives (libel law) not to share it.
- astrange 4y ago
  Remember Theranos wasn't even big tech, and only had one major Silicon Valley investor in it; they were a fake big tech company attracting people who wanted to be SV but weren't. The usual VCs didn't even trust them!
- pencilguin 4y ago
  Add NRGV ("Energy Vault", once well over $2B, now $0.4B and still badly overvalued) to the Theranos pile. And all but one of the fusion startups. (Maybe them too.) Kyoto Fusioneering has realized that there is lots of money to be made selling parts for phony demos to fusion startups. BTW there will not be any Mars colony in this century. Or Tesla office-robot.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

A major problem with the technology media is that they don’t investigate the companies, because they have to stay on their good side in order to be invited to the events, and to get the information. When they criticize the company the company freezes them out; i.e. Apple.

klooney 4y ago

Yglesias doesn't think that no investigation should be done or that tech is all good- he has a riff that "Facebook is bad, Facebook employees should feel bad about working there, and they should feel shame admitting where they work" that he goes on occasionally.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

KKKKkkkk1 4y ago

> You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue. That's because he's being very charitable to what is happening. In fact, under the guise of aggressively investigative coverage, the media is constantly propagating false memes about the industry. Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants.

throwaway1777 4y ago
Too on the nose. When I worked at faang almost my entire org was Indians.
- PradeetPatel 4y ago
  The generalisation of "Indians" in the tech sector is doing a lot more harm than one may think. India is a massive country, with some of the most diverse range of cultures and people. The fact that most FAANG CEOs are Indians should speak volumes. Negative stereotyping hurts everyone, only by acceptance and embrace our differences can we move forward.
  - bagels 4y ago
    Do you consider "Indians" to be pejorative?
    - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
      He probably considers being lumped in with certain other Indians pejorative. It's funny, on producing that interpretation my first thought was 'He must be high caste'. Now that's a negative stereotype!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - xwolfi 4y ago

DeathArrow 4y ago

>Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US. I thought weapon and pharmaceutical industries beat the tech.

tsimionescu 4y ago
On power, probably (at least lobbying power - direct influence on us is the opposite); but on wealth, Apple + Microsoft is enough to make the tech sector the wealthiest.

rrwo 4y ago

I was going to post the same thing.

BurningFrog 4y ago

> The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage? That this very basic failure of reading comprehension has been voted to the top is both sad and surprising.

scrozier 4y ago
That this very basic lack of clarity in writing was misunderstood is unsurprising.

majjgepolja 4y ago

Not so sure about that, with a certain clickbait coverage of solarwinds story creating bad PR for Jetbrains, (perhaps among the least controversial tech companies). That's what happens when liberal arts people think they're too delicate to understand anything more nuanced than US political thing of the day.

colinmhayes 4y ago

>> highly oppositional at all times > tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage? I don't see how you can read his quote and come up with yours. Absolute strawman

mensetmanusman 4y ago

“Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US.” Industries more powerful: -Finance -Banking -Defense -Oil&Gas